No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama. With a sprawling labor system that dates back more than 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has constructed a template for the commercialization of mass incarceration.

Most jobs are inside facilities, where the state’s inmates — who are disproportionately Black — can be sentenced to hard labor and forced to work for free doing everything from mopping floors to laundry. But more than 10,000 inmates have logged a combined 17 million work hours outside Alabama’s prison walls since 2018, for entities like city and county governments and businesses that range from major car-part manufacturers and meat-processing plants to distribution centers for major retailers like Walmart, the AP determined.

https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-alabama-3b2c7e414c681ba545dc1d0ad30bfaf5

    • beliquititious@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      7 days ago

      Literally in some cases recently freed slaves were arrested for being black and leased back to the same locations where they were enslaved to the same people.

      • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        That’s where our tireless and dedicated police force got started, the racism hasn’t gone anywhere they just have better toys now

        • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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          7 days ago

          I bet there were cops before that.

          I’m thinking that there were cops quite a while before America was a thing.

          But thanks for the surprising lack of history.

          • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
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            7 days ago

            Perhaps I should have specified I am an American talking about American police in America, to make it easier for you to follow along but thank you for the surprising and completely unnecessary rudeness on behalf of the pigs though, happy holidays and fuck off to lick laces 🙂